Successful Install on Watchguard Firebox X700!

stephenw10

Why not just download the embedded image and write it to the compact flash card?

http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/HOWTO_Install_pfSense#Embedded_.28Compact_Flash.29_Installation

Steve

Edit: I may have misunderstood your problem here. ;)

ng12345

Appreciate all the information on this; I just bought an x700 to try and hack pfsense onto it.

When I turn the firewall on, the red and orange lights stay on constantly and there is a bar of black boxes on the top line of the lcd.

it never reaches the booting stage. i tried with the original CF card and the pfsense formatted laptop drive

is my firewall fried?

stephenw10

The orange, power, led and the red, unarmed, led stay on thats correct. The unarmed led is supposed to turn green when the system has booted correctly with the original OS. No one has ever figured out the correct command for bsd so pfsense doesn't do that, yet!
The lcd is written by the bios during boot so if it's only showing bars that's not good.
Try clearing the CMOS.

Steve

Edit: I figured out the arm/disarm led! ;D Check it out here.

ng12345

thanks for the input.

i popped out the cmos battery for 30s-1min and then stuck it back in.

when i power on the 10 and 100 lights flash green for a millisecond on the last port, the red and orange ones turn on and it stays with the black bars

does it need an ethernet connection to post?

any other way to clear the cmos? is there a cmos reset pin?

stephenw10

I don't actually have one of these to hand anymore and my memory is a little vague. ::)
I think that the ethernet port leds are driven directly such that they should light to indicate a link even of the board hasn't posted. Try connecting a PC or a switch, at least then you'd know if the board is powering up at all.
Have you tested the cmos battery? Usually after a reset the board will automatically boot into the bios so you can set it up. Without a pci graphics card or console redirection you wouldn't know that is happening. If the battery is flat it will do that on every boot!
It could be just the screen that's broken. It could be a faulty PSU (only one rail). Try swapping it for a standard atx if you have one.
If the battery is good then I'd try re-seating all the components including the cpu. The board requires the cpu and some ram to post.

Steve

jonnytabpni

Folks,

I've been following this large thread for quite some time now. I have a few posts a few pages back, where I commented on the fact that I aquired one of these boxes and tried pfsense. Of course, I got the timeout errors.

Today, I decided to try again with the latest 2.0 build (1/1/11). Low and behold, no timeouts!! The box has had an uptime of 9 hours with 4 ports (interfaces) configured as well as 3 or 4 IPSEC tunnels. It's also being used in production with no timeouts showing in system.log. The only issue I had was that I needed to remove the crypto card for IPSEC traffic to pass. No idea why, however I'm not too bothered as 1.2Ghz is plenty for me.

Have the watchdog timeouts been fixed, and are these cheap boxes excellent little pfsense gems?

stephenw10

@jonnytabpni:

Have the watchdog timeouts been fixed, and are these cheap boxes excellent little pfsense gems?

If that's true then it's great news. However I wouldn't get your hopes up just yet. Reading back through this and other threads on this issue, people have seemingly solved the timeout problem before only for it to come back after some time.
Have there been any changes to the re driver recently?

Steve

iFloris

@stephenw10:

If that's true then it's great news. However I wouldn't get your hopes up just yet. Reading back through this and other threads on this issue, people have seemingly solved the timeout problem before only for it to come back after some time.
Have there been any changes to the re driver recently?
Steve

There have not been changes to the driver, but rather in the way that pfsense 2.0 works.
By disabling device polling, hardware checksum offload, hardware tcp segmentation offload and hardware large receive offload, as well as changing the system tunables net.inet.tcp.tso and hw.bce.tso_enable to 0, watchdog timeouts are a thing of the past.

Except for one situation: When accessing the webgui on a macbook pro over a 2.4ghz wirelss N connection coming from a first generation Apple time capsule, timeouts are thrown up.
Attempts to replicate this through other wireless base stations, different connections and different devices have failed, which leads me to believe that this is a different issue entirely.
That laptop is never used for accessing the webgui, so it is irrelevant to me.

As usual, ymmv of course.

Edit: typo, shuffle sections

jonnytabpni

@iFloris:

There have not been changes to the driver, but rather in the way that pfsense 2.0 works.
By disabling device polling, hardware checksum offload, hardware tcp segmentation offload and hardware large receive offload, as well as changing the system tunables net.inet.tcp.tso and hw.bce.tso_enable to 0, watchdog timeouts are a thing of the past.

Are you saying that these things are changed by default? I haven't touched any of those settings.

BTW, I don't have access to the serial console. If timeouts were being thrown, where would I see them? In system.log?

I've had the traffic graph up all night and no matter what I do, I have yet to see one timeout with this build. Even Windows CIFS transfers work between interfaces

iFloris

@jonnytabpni:

Are you saying that these things are changed by default? I haven't touched any of those settings.

BTW, I don't have access to the serial console. If timeouts were being thrown, where would I see them? In system.log?

A few settings have been changed by default, but I changed them all manually a while ago, just to be sure.
Timeouts are seen in console, system.log and felt by having a non-responsive internet connection / webgui.

jonnytabpni

Which build are you running?

iFloris

@jonnytabpni:

Which build are you running?

At the moment, my pfsense version is 2.0-BETA5 (i386) built on Sat Jan 1 17:53:01 EST 2.
I usually update once a week on saturday.

jonnytabpni

@iFloris:

At the moment, my pfsense version is 2.0-BETA5 (i386) built on Sat Jan 1 17:53:01 EST 2.
I usually update once a week on saturday.

Im not far from you:
2.0-BETA5 (i386) built on Sat Jan 1 19:56:40 EST 2011

Have you seen timeouts at all with this current build?

iFloris

@jonnytabpni:

Im not far from you:
2.0-BETA5 (i386) built on Sat Jan 1 19:56:40 EST 2011

Have you seen timeouts at all with this current build?

No.

In fact, I haven't seen any timeouts whatsoever using any 2.0b4 build (ignoring an odd issue with a macbook pro) since this post:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,25870.msg147085.html#msg147085

jonnytabpni

@iFloris:

In fact, I haven't seen any timeouts whatsoever using any 2.0b4 build (ignoring an odd issue with a macbook pro) since this post:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,25870.msg147085.html#msg147085

Did the MBP cause timeouts on the build you're using today?

Also, reading your other post, I do experience the "went backwards" error at bootup, however it doesn't stop anything from working.

I'm using an HP Procurve switch between my pfsense and machines. In my inital testing, I did have my laptop plugged directly into the FB, but still no timeouts were seen

jonnytabpni

Just to keep everyone updated, I ran some Windows CIFS tests with my laptop connected directly to a port on the Firebox. The CIFS servers is connected to another interface however there is a switch between server and FB.

My first test was 5 or 6 files totalling around 1GB. My second test was lots of smallish (30MB) files totalling around 200MB. During the tests, I had a Traffic Graph open in Firefox on my desktop machine (connected to same interface as CIFS server).

Not a single watchdog timeout happened. I have yet to see any timeouts on my current build (2.0-BETA5 (i386) built on Sat Jan 1 19:56:40 EST 2011), and the box has had an uptime of 1 day, 03:19 with 4 interfaces activated (5 during my CIFS tests).

The only things I noticed during my CIFS tests was that it was capped at around 60Mbps, and as I removed the network cable from my laptop after the 2nd test (after a few hours of inactivity), I noticed that "check_reload_status: Linkup starting re5" was displayed in system.log, but this is probably normal.

The capping issue could be due to some default config changed that has potentially stopped the timeouts. But that's ok as within our company, I have designated these boxes for use in "Medium Traffic Sites", or at least I will once we've had a few weeks of no timeouts.

(Btw, The "Low Traffic Sites" have ALIX 2D3 and the "High Traffic Sites" have Supermicro Servers)

What you all think?

Thanks

stephenw10

It wouldn't surprise me to find that the 60Mbps cap is a result of the low quality Realtek NICs, especially since all the offloading options have been disabled.

Edit: Thinking about it the offloading options are supposed to free up the cpu not the NIC so in fact, unless the cpu is maxxed out, this may be the faster setup.

jonnytabpni

@stephenw10:

It wouldn't surprise me to find that the 60Mbps cap is a result of the low quality Realtek NICs, especially since all the offloading options have been disabled.

Yeah, you're probably right. The ALIX boards which are good quality parts cap at around 80Mbps, so 60Mbps on low quality hardware seems ok. I'm just interested to hear from anyone who is having timeout issues with the current 2.0 build. I may buy another x700 and deploy it at another office so at least we will have 2 real-life tests going on

jonnytabpni

I'm really trying to get to the bottom of why things are beginning to work now. Can any devs comment on if any defaults have changed? Looking at the FreeBSD code:

http://svn.freebsd.org/viewvc/base/stable/8/sys/dev/re/if_re.c?view=log

you will notice that the Firebox NICS (8139) hasn't been mentioned since April 2009 (which in fact does address the timeout issue on the FB NICs). So either the Apr 09 fix didn't make it to pfSense until recently, or that a more recent driver change has fixed it (i.e. the Apr 09 fix did nothing). Or pfsense default tuning has changed

I'm clueless as to how the freebsd svn code relates to what goes into pfSense beta snapshots..

Any clues are appreciated

Cheers

iFloris

@jonnytabpni:

Did the MBP cause timeouts on the build you're using

Honestly, it only happens when browsing pfsense's webgui, so I don't know.
The machine has been used for all kinds of other Internet related activities, so I'm confident that it doesn't cause timeouts during normal use.

Also, regarding the speed of the firebox:
I use the fireboxe to firewall a 120/10 connection and it reaches a sustained 98.8 mbit down while uploading at 9.89 mbit with around 48% CPU usage (tends to fluctuate up and down a lot).
When I only just got the fireboxes I ran some tests using a 100/100 connection and while the machine still threw up watchdog timeouts back then (February or march) it was able to firewall 98/98 mbit when testing with FTP transfers.